FOUR DEAD WOMEN
In childhood, they had constructed a kingdom, albeit one in which the sky had already begun to crumple.
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As always, Emma is the first to return, and as she is enveloped into her father’s hug all the old worries come back: all the same tremors, the same anxieties of the body. The house itself has barely changed, except for the soft, almost imperceptible groan of her mother’s oxygen machine spreading slow throughout the halls.
In her bedroom, her mother’s crooked body lies attached to a dozen spidery tubes, a plastic web that Emma slips through gingerly as she hugs her mother hello. Blood has bloomed bright in her mother’s right eye, unfurling like a sea anemone; her father tries to warn her, but the burst vessel does not scare her. Rather, Emma is reminded of another moment of bloodshed, when clots as briny-dark as ocean water spattered down her thighs and into the green of the toilet bowl. The comparison gives her a moment of satisfaction; when she leans to kiss her, she thinks again of all the things her mother could have told her, but didn’t.
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Notes
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theonlylivingvirgininny reblogged this from confusionis
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qbfquickbrownfox reblogged this from confusionis and added:
“Four Dead Women,” by Smith student Rhian Sasseen ‘12,...Quick Brown Fox vol. 1.
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